1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of sharing data over a network, having a plurality of network connected terminals, each comprising memory means and processing means, said memory means including instructions for equipping objects with attributes and managing the duplication thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Methods according to which users share data as information or content between their respective terminals being connected to a network are widely known. The Internet is one such network, wherein user terminals access information stored on web pages in a variety of formats and can also download program files or data files by means of protocols such as file transfer protocol.
However, the users of such user terminals must first locate said information or data amongst the literally millions of web pages which can today be accessed on the Internet. Most of the time said location of information or data is achieved by means of generic search engines, such as Altavista or Lycos, which receive an input string ie keywords, from a user terminal, and match said input string with an identical string stored within a web page. As said matching operation is performed according to character-based Boolean parameters, said generic search engines invariably return thousands and, potentially, hundreds of thousands of hypertext links pointing to mostly redundant matching web pages.
Methods are known which have improved the matching accuracy of said generic internet search engines, for instance with the inclusion of logical characters such as a “plus” or “comma” sign within the input string inputted at the user terminal. In practice, however, said methods according to the known art still fail to reduce the amount of redundant search results down to a reasonable number of entries for a user to consult.
A recent development in Internet connectivity is the development of peer-to-peer networking, wherein users of user terminals connected to the Internet can access information and data stored in their respective user terminals rather than stored in central internet servers. Whereas this development is known to improve problems of bandwidth utilisation and latency which are well known to those skilled in the art, said developments feature the same disadvantages in terms of locating information or data locating as explained above.